Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 570, 24 January 1929, Page 5

Mundane Musings

Master Salesmen Sometimes as I walk in places where nurses are ■wheeling their very young charges in perambulators, I ] suffer torture. Many of the infants I are lying face up, with the light and ! the sun pouring down upon their tender, unprotected eyes. What would the mothers who are bringing their children up on a system worked out to a hair’s-breadth of a fraction feel if they were to know that which is going on in their absence Yet, if allowed oneself to think o£ this for more than a moment, madness would be the result. Y'ou can't pull the shades every time over all the babies of the world who are going squinty-eyed because of carelessness. So you learn to put it out of your thoughts. In the same way, when I shop it is often a matter of marvel to me how some businesses survive the dangers to which they are subjected in the matter of salesmanship. Many of the salespeople are indifferent to your tastes or your wants, and care only to sell to you if you would buy meekly what they choose to give you. Competition—which God bless and preserve and keep to us if the individual is ever to have any consideration at all—has altered this very much. The will to please is raising its graceful head in places where every need, from motor-cars to mince pies, is taken care of. Schools for the teaching of salesmanship are part of the inner working of most of the big stores. Selling must be an art if success is to be won. In spite of this, the proprietors are almost as much at the mercy of chance as are the babies in the unshaded perambulators. This must be true, or else such things would uot continue as do in places where one would say that every precaution had been taken and every form of supervision was operating. One still stands meekly by for waitresses absorbed in conversation to discover one; still waits patiently while bevies of gentlemen leave it a moot point as to who shall approach you; still wilt under the scornful eye of the saleslady who discovers first go-off that you don't suit her things and has decided that you shall not waste her time. Often have I been driven out of shops which might have taken my money if they had been a little kinder to me. The genius, naturally, is born, not made, and I discovered one a week or two ago. Dropping in at a shop I had never entered before, to get some unimportant trifle, I saw a coat and asked to try it on. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t right. The head woman, the buyer, I suppose, came out and looked at me in it, gave her opinion and left the matter to me. I was so grateful to her for not regarding my form as if it filled her with disgust that I felt very much inclined to take the coat; but X didn’t. She bore me no malice and really treated me rather as an equal; as if by not buying I knew my own business best, and, further, might be right. Later, because of this, I went in again and tried on another. She said herself it was too small, but she would get me one large enough. I asked her searchingly if she didn’t think that coat would make me look too big. When I say this, as a rule their eyes travel unerringly to my defects. If their eyes say yes and their lips no then I hate them, for I know they are lying simply to sell a coat, and reserving to themselves the right to think the disastrous truth. This one looked at me appraisingly. Her eye travelled all over, up and down, and 1 watcher her with my mind, like a lynx. She said, thoughtfully, “No, you’ve got a beautiful line here” —she indicated it —“and a splendidly straight back. Y T ou carry yourself well.” Then she added: “We’ll have it done, and if it isn’t right you needn’t take it.” I went out of the shop feeling like the Samothrace Victory. What she had given me I knew was mine by right, but, being basically most incurably humble, I as a rule only remember the wrong bits. All day I walked well, even when I was tired. And the shop has had more money from me since. I would have hated a woman who flattered me without judgment. But this one., knew. She gave me what was mine. And I gave her what was hers. We were equals each at our own work. Later I was talking with a friend about a paper-mau I had gossiped with at a quiet hour in the evening, when the rush of work was over. In turn she told me that she had two who supplied her as she went to her office in the morning and as she returned home at night. To them she was vowed by acts of their own. Very slight acts, but of tremendous importance to them as merchants. And to her as a human being. One, whenever she had the air of being in a hurry, said, “Pay me to-morrow.” And the other seeing her in the distance would have her paper ready and folded, which "he often handed to her with his eye upon the next customer. As if bo say, “You are really in my mind and consciousness, although passing trade must be taken care of.” Here are three degrees of genius. The first, my lady, a master-mind, trained to success; the second, my friend’s first paper-man, one who has the vision to realise honesty and take a chance on it; and the third, an unconscious maker of ententes through his eye and mind working well together. Of such is the kingdom of heaven in business on earth.